Philosophy, Politics & Economics

I am an Associate Professor in Economics and Wigmore Clarendon Fellow in Economics at Worcester College. My research is on theoretical models of pricing in imperfect competition, with a recent focus on price discrimination and its welfare effects. I have also worked on the regulation of privately-owned utilities. Regulatory Reform: Economic Analysis and British Experience (MIT Press), written with co-authors Mark Armstrong and John Vickers, was published in 1994. I have papers in the American Economic Review, The Economic Journal and the Rand Journal of Economics, and am a former editor of Oxford Economic Papers.

For undergraduates I have taught Introductory Economics, Microeconomics, Macroeconomics, the Economics of Industry and International Economics. I have also taught environmental economics, and have taught Industrial Organization to graduate students. I was Head of Department between October 2019 and September 2020.

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Dr Peramatzis’ specialities are ancient philosophy, especially Aristotle’s metaphysics, logic and epistemology and Plato’s metaphysics and epistemology.

I joined Oxford in September 2012 from Warwick where I was Associate Professor of Political Theory. Before that I was Lecturer in Political Philosophy at Reading and at Manchester and a Barbara McCoy Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford University. I studied PPE at New College and completed my MPhil and DPhil at Nuffield College. I grew up in Warsaw.

Undergraduate: tutorials in Political Theory (Prelims and the core Honours paper) and Advanced Paper in Theories of Justice.

Graduate: optional MPhil Mitigating Historical Injustice class; core MPhil/MSc Reasoning in Political Philosophy class; core MPhil/MSc Political Theory class.

I am mostly interested in the problem of what people owe to each other as a matter of domestic, global and historical (post war) justice including commemoration and remembrance. I am also interested in the debate about ideal and nonideal theory: the problem of how to make theories of justice relevant to urgent, real world problems while avoiding ad hoc theorising and defeatism.

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My work falls mainly within contemporary philosophy of language, epistemology and philosophy of action. Most of my research relates either to linguistic (especially semantic) knowledge or to practical knowledge and skill, and sometimes to connections between these. More broadly, my work engages with theories of normativity in relation to skill, factual knowledge, thought and reasoning, and linguistic communication. I also have a general interest in the work of Gilbert Ryle, especially his relatively neglected work on thinking and improvisation.

I teach the undergraduate finals papers in Knowledge and Reality, Philosophy of Logic and Language, Wittgenstein, Philosophy of Mind, and Ethics. I will also be teaching first-year General Philosophy and Introduction to Logic. In Michaelmas 2019, I will be teaching a graduate (BPhil) class on Knowledge, Reason and Action, with Prof. John Hyman.

Dr Michael Drolet is Senior Research Fellow in the History of Political Thought, Worcester College. He is an intellectual historian with interests in 18th, 19th, and 20th century French philosophy, and French political, social, and economic thought. He has written widely on French liberalism, French Romantic Socialism, and contemporary French thought. He is author of Tocqueville, Democracy and Social Reform (2003), The Postmodernism Reader: Foundational Texts (2004), and, with Ludovic Frobert (CNRS-ENS-Lyon), is writing a book on the economic thought of Jules Leroux (1805-1883) and a book on the political, social, and philosophical thought of Pierre Leroux (1797-1871). He is also writing a book on the Saint-Simonian and statesman, Michel Chevalier (1805-1879).

Michael’s interest in 18th and 19th century French thought extends to a wide range of topics including the interface between science, technology, and political, social and economic thought. He is a member of Writing Technology/The Technology of Writing: An interdisciplinary early modern network and is co-organiser with Ludovic Frobert (CNRS-ENS-Lyon), Thomas Bouchet (Centre Walras, Université de Lausanne) and Marie Thebaud-Sorger (CNRS-CentreAlexandre Koyré, EHESS) of the Encyclopédie Nouvelle project, an interdisciplinary project that examines the relationship between knowledge, science, and political and social practices, exploring how the locus of knowledge is a politically contested domain.

Michael is also interested in competing conceptions of humanity’s relationship with/to nature, and is animated by questions pertaining to how eighteenth- and nineteenth-century scientists, inventors, engineers, economists, and political and social thinkers understood humanity’s relationship to nature, and engaged with issues around industrialisation and its impact on the natural environment.

My research looks at certain cornerstones of Aristotle’s thought, like the distinction between substance and non-substance, truth and falsehood, and potentiality and actuality. I am particularly fascinated by how Aristotle uses these distinctions in order to solve or clarify key problems in his metaphysics, as well as in his logic and psychology.

I am a Departmental Lecturer in Political Theory at the University of Oxford. I teach a variety of courses related to Moral and Political Philosophy. My research primarily concerns questions related to equality and freedom of expression.

Much of my research concerns equality and agency. In that vein a part of my work involves exploring and defending a form of egalitarianism which judges all inequalities in some respect unfair unless they are appropriately related to the choices persons make. Some of this has consisted in reflecting on the conditions under which it is appropriate to hold persons responsible for their choices; more specifically, asking when the responsible choices persons make justify their being worse off than others. Another closely related part of my work involves considering different ways of conceptualising the value of equality and exploring how they related to one another.
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My most recent research concerns freedom of expression. I am especially interested in the ways in which freedom of expression can be threatened by sources other than state regulation. At present I am developing an account of the freedom-restricting effects of social penalties on expression. Part of this involves thinking about the responsibilities we may have to refrain from imposing expression-related social penalties and countering the impact they can have on freedom of expression.

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I studied Philosophy and Computer Science at the Humboldt University in Berlin and then moved to Scotland to pursue a PhD in Philosophy at the University of St Andrews. My doctoral studies were supported by PETAF (Perspectival Thoughts and Facts), as part of the FP7 Marie Curie Initial Training Network (European Commission Funding). I graduated with a thesis on Aristotle’s Philosophy of Mathematics under the supervision of Sarah Broadie and Katherine Hawley. In 2015, I moved to Oxford to start as a stipendiary lecturer in philosophy at Wadham and St Hilda’s Colleges while also maintaining a part-time position as “Wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin” (≅ fixed-term lecturer) at Bonn University, Germany. My research focuses on the nature of mathematical objects in Aristotle and Plato, with a particular interest in how their views tie in with their more general views in epistemology and ontology.

Since 2016, I have been a stipendiary lecturer in philosophy at Worcester College, Oxford, while also teaching casually for several Oxford Colleges and visiting student programmes. I teach a wide range of philosophy papers including General Philosophy, Plato’s Meno and Euthyphro (Greek), Early Greek Philosophy (Greek), Frege’s Foundations of Arithmetic, Aristotle on Nature, Life and Mind (Greek/translation), Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics (Greek/trans), Plato’s Republic (Greek/trans), Plato’s Theaetetus and Sophist (Greek/trans), Knowledge & Reality, Philosophy of Mathematics, Philosophy of Mind, Early Modern Philosophy, Kant, Ethics and Feminist Philosophy.